Surface Classification from Aircraft Icing Droplet Splash Images

摘要

The build up of water ice on aircraft flight surfaces poses a significant safety risk. As a result, much effort has gone into studying this problem in order to understand how individual droplets contribute to the accretion process. One approach has been to capture the moment of impact of a supercooled droplet onto a surface placed in an icing tunnel. However, this produces a large number of images that must be analysed manually. This paper describes the development of an automated analysis system, employing image processing techniques, that is capable of classifying the impact images without operator input. Using a carefully chosen feature vector and K-means clustering algorithm, the classification results from the automated system are comparable with that achieved using the manual approach.